The Cutting Edge
by Mousme
Summary: Bill Harvelle's knife is it's own particular kind of burden, which Jo has never minded carrying.


Title: **The Cutting Edge [the Someone Has to Bleed Remix], R, John/Jo**

Pairing: John/Jo

Rating: R for mentions of sex

Disclaimer: Supernatural gehört mir nicht! (Disclaiming sounds way more impressive in German. Or something.)

Warning(s): mentions of sex, mild violence

Spoilers: through 5.10, "Abandon All Hope"

Wordcount: 1,451

Original Story: **Hearts & Bones** by **dreamlittleyo**

Summary: Bill Harvelle's knife is it's own particular kind of burden, which Jo has never minded carrying.

Neurotic Author's Note #1: Many, many thanks to **dreamlittleyo** for offering up your lovely fic to be remixed. I must say that I was VASTLY intimidated at the thought of even coming near it, let alone remixing, but I gave it my best shot. I hope you like it!

Neurotic Author's Note #2: Okay, so welcome to me being well outside my comfort zone. With a couple of exceptions, I am a gen writer, and this is a pairing I never even would have considered on my own. Nonetheless, I felt it was important enough to keep it as/is in the story.

Neurotic Author's Note #3: The original story was set in a Season 2 AU, and this one is not. It assumes everything happened in the Show the way it did.

* * *

Jo keeps the blade finely-honed. Learns to flip the knife in either hand, back and forth, until it's an extension of her arm, a part of her. She's certain it was a part of her long before she picked it up, linked to her by blood. She picks up the knife with its well-worn handle, traces the initials reverently with the tip of her index finger: W. A. H. She doesn't let herself cry, even when her mother catches her with the knife and, instead of saying anything, simply presses her lips into a thin line, turns on her heel and stalks from the room.

"It's a fine blade," John tells her the first time he sees it, and she can tell he means it.

He recognizes it, she can tell that too: her dad carried it everywhere with him, used to flip it between his fingers the way she's taught herself to do. The first time she tries it the blade catches the sun as it twirls in the air, and there's a flash of light and pain as her fingers close around it. Blood drips onto the floor, followed by the knife, hilt first, clattering loudly on the blue and white tile. She still has a scar on the third joint of her middle and ring fingers from where she made a halfway-botched job of stitching it up, too embarrassed to show the injury to her mother.

She lets John brush his lips over that scar, nibble at her palm and kiss the inside of her wrist, stubble scraping along sensitive skin, but he ignores the others she's acquired since she started hunting. There aren't that many —she's young and hasn't been living her father's life that long— and certainly she doesn't have his roadmap of scars, criss-crossing the landscape of his body. She's proud of the evidence of her survival, doesn't understand his reluctance to let her touch his own scars, his squeamishness when his fingers come into contact with the raised pink marks on her skin. She arches into his touch, and after a while the scars fade, and they don't talk about them.

They don't talk about many things. A silent hunter is a hunter who'll live to see the sunrise. When you spend long enough hunting, long enough on your own, silence becomes your companion. Becomes easier to understand than speech. She lets her tongue speak quietly against his, their breath exchanging questions and answers without so much as a word uttered between them. He carries the weight of his age and his secrets, just as she trails the memory of her long-dead father in her wake, the strange looks of her supposed friends at college, her mother's fear and disapproval. When they're together, her burden doesn't feel as heavy, and it's nothing to help him shoulder whatever it is that's weighing him down. She never asks, knowing she'll hate his answers. For brief moments, the weight is lifted away entirely as she gasps his name and listens to his quiet climax, his silence louder than if he yelled.

Jo awakens early one morning —so early that the sun hasn't yet begun to rise— and finds him outside, the knife buried in a pile of kindling, salt gleaming dully against the dark earth, lighter in hand.

They fight, then, for the first and last time. She snatches the knife back before he can set it alight, and she screams at him, railing incoherently. She can't bring herself to listen to his explanations. He lets her hammer at his chest with both fists, tiny and impotent, a mouse scrabbling against a stone wall. She lands one solid punch to his jaw before running back inside the motel room, snatching up her things, and runs blindly toward the nearest highway. She hitches a ride to town, and he doesn't try to follow. For the first few weeks, she's actually grateful to him for it.

It's Dean she kind of falls for, months later, but it's Sam who reminds her most of him. He has the same smile, the one that wipes the identical scowl off his face like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. She feels small next to Sam, small, and safe, sheltered under a wall. She doesn't want safe, though, not anymore. Safe is an illusion that shatters into a hundred thousand shards the moment her mother asks about her old friend. Jo pulls away from them both, pulls out her knife and flips it in her fingers, putting steel between them and the raw, bleeding hole they've just carved into her chest. She stays silent, watches the light play off the blade.

They come and they go, just like he used to. She doesn't miss them when they're gone, just as she never missed him. He came and went like the tide, and it never occurred to her to ask him to stay. She never wanted him to, anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Dean watching her, interest evident in his body language. Sam isn't the only one who's like his father. For a moment she finds herself wondering if Dean's skin has the same faint tang of salt and motor oil, blood and gunpowder, violence and regret. He talks more than John, is all talk and swagger where John was silence and strength. She keeps away from Sam for that very reason, can't bear to be near the constant reminder, sidles up to Dean at the bar and shares a couple of PBRs under Ash's amused gaze.

She and Dean perform a complicated dance of will-they-won't-they, even though she's mostly decided that they won't. She comes close to changing her mind a few times, but every time she finds herself alone again, staring at the knife cradled in her hands. The knife play is all for show, something she does in public —a way to prove that she's not just a fragile little girl. It's hard enough for a woman to be taken seriously in a world that's all testosterone and flannel and rusted pick-up trucks without factoring being blonde and a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet into the mix. When she's alone, she holds the knife still. There's no posturing, no lying with her entire body about who and what she is. When she's alone, she lets herself simply be. Lets herself imagine that her father is still watching over her.

Jo uses the knife to bring down a Black Dog. She stabs the creature right through the eye before finishing it off with a consecrated bullet, while her mother is still five minutes away, her voice a distant note of panic. Jo puts up with the tongue-lashing she gets when it's all over, not because she deserves it, but because she's not sure she can breathe under the weight of the memories that have come back to settle over her. She remembers a crappy little motel near Windsor, the room so cold her breath had misted in front of her face. John was warm, she remembers, always ran a little hotter than most, and by the time they were done the single window in the room had fogged up, and she had moulded herself to his body, tucked up along his side, feeling his ribcage expanding and contracting with every breath. It's cold here too, she always feels cold when the hunts are over, as though the warmth just seeps from her pores.

It's only at the end, when it's all far too late, that she understands. Her hands have gone numb, and she can feel the world fading, the colours bleeding into the floor along with the rest of her life. That's when she sees him, leather jacket and all, smiling at her. She wants to laugh, to throw herself in his arms and shriek "Daddy!" just like when she was still wearing her hair in braids, but all she can manage is a gurgling sigh as the breath leaves her body for the last time. She doesn't feel her mother's lips against her forehead, but she sees the mist her last breath makes in the air before her.

Jo returns her Daddy's smile, her eyes glassy. The knife is in her pocket, and she's surrounded by rock salt and explosives. When it's over, there will be nothing left of her, or it. She leaves her body behind, and steps toward the light, happy for the first time in a very long time. Her father is just ahead of her, her mother just behind, and she thinks that, after everything, they've all more than earned their rest.


End file.
